Confused and frustrated -- client hardware?

[Grasshopper]

Please help me choose hardware for a dedicated SageClient PC. What I want is a small, quiet, cheap PC with a DVD drive. I'll be outputting video via composite to a 27 inch standard res TV and audio via SPDIF to an amp to do 5.1 sound. If possible, I'd like to retain the option of switching to HDTV output over DVI at a later date, when the purchasing department (my wife) approves the acquisition of an HDTV. Don't need a capture card in the box, as that'll be taken care of elsewhere.

I'd like a small box, so I've been concentrating on microATX cases and have just about settled on the Antec Minuet. But I'm willing to be talked out of that, if others are much happier with other cases.

Looking at motherboards, I've been concentrating on AMD boards for price/performance purposes. I've been told that nForce2 boards with the MCP-T southbridge are ideal, which conveniently narrows the field to 1 possibility: the Shuttle MN31N. An older board that might do the job is the ASUS A7N266-VM. But the asus board is an old nForce1 unit with AGP4x and USB1.1 rather than nForce2 with AGP8x, 1394, and USB2 -- while I don't think I absolutely need these features, I worry that I'll kick myself later for not spending the $30 extra for the Shuttle board.

For a video card, my understanding is that an Ati 9600SE is fine for TV output and that spending more won't get me higher quality TV out. Is this correct?

Past that, things are fairly simple: a CPU (how much is enough?), some memory, a DVD drive. I have a hard drive available, so that's not a problem.

Are there better options than the ones I'm looking at, for my purposes? I can't imagine I'm doing something terribly new or different here, so I'd greatly value the wisdom and experience of those who have gone before.

I've searched these forums, but many of the responses are confusing to me (or perhaps I'm easily confused right now). If you think it'd be helpful, I could collate responses to my questions and my experiences building the PC into a sort of FAQ.

[ErsatzTom]

I replied to your PM about the minuet.

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